Burning Bright: Stories (11 page)

Jesse rose slowly. He hadn’t twisted an ankle or broken an arm and that seemed his first bit of luck since walking into the gorge. When Jesse reached the crest, his legs were so weak he clutched a maple sapling to ease himself to the ground. He looked down through the cascading trees. An orange and white rescue squad van had now arrived. Workers huddled around the well, and Jesse couldn’t see much of what they were doing but before long a stretcher was carried to the van. He
was too far away to tell the ranger’s condition, even if the man was alive.

At the least a broken arm or leg, Jesse knew, and tried to think of an injury that would make things all right, like a concussion to make the ranger forget what had happened, or the ranger hurting bad enough that shock made him forget. Jesse tried not to think about the snapped bone being in the back or neck.

The van’s back doors closed from within, and the vehicle turned onto the logging road. The siren was off but the beacon drenched the woods red. The woman ranger scoured the hillside with binoculars, sweeping without pause over where Jesse sat. Another green forest service truck drove up, two more rangers spilling out. Then Sheriff Arrowood’s car, silent as the ambulance.

The sun lay behind Clingman’s Dome now, and Jesse knew waiting any longer would only make it harder. He moved in a stupor of exhaustion, feet stumbling over roots and rocks, swaying like a drunk. When he got far enough, he’d be able to come down the ridge, ascend the narrow gorge mouth. But Jesse was so tired he didn’t know how he could go any farther without resting. His knees grated bone on bone, popping and crackling each time they bent or twisted. He panted and wheezed and imagined his lungs an accordion that never unfolded enough.

Old and a fool
. That’s what the ranger had called Jesse. An old man no doubt. His body told him so every morning when he awoke. The liniment he applied to his joints and muscles each morning and night made him think of himself as a creaky rust-corroded machine that must be oiled and warmed up before it could sputter to life. Maybe a fool as well, he acknowledged, for who other than a fool could have gotten into such a fix.

Jesse found a felled oak and sat down, a mistake because he couldn’t imagine summoning the energy to rise. He looked through the trees. Sheriff Arrowood’s car was gone, but the truck and jeep were still there. He didn’t see but one person and knew the others searched the woods for him. A crow cawed once farther up the ridge. Then no other sound, not even the wind. Jesse took the backpack and pitched it into the thick woods below, watched it tumble out of sight. A waste, but he couldn’t risk their searching his house. He thought about tossing the pistol as well but the gun had belonged to his father, his father’s father before that. Besides, if they found it in his house that was no proof it was the pistol the ranger had seen. They had no proof of anything really. Even his being in the gorge was just the ranger’s word against his. If he could get back to the house.

Night fell fast now, darkness webbing the gaps between tree trunks and branches. Below, high-beam flashlights flickered on. Jesse remembered two weeks
after his great-aunt’s burial. Graham Sutherland had come out of the gorge shaking and chalk-faced, not able to tell what had happened until Jesse’s father gave him a draught of whiskey. Graham had been fishing near the old homestead and glimpsed something on the far bank, there for just a moment. Though a sunny spring afternoon, the weather in the gorge had suddenly turned cold and damp. Graham had seen her then, moving through the trees toward him, her arms outstretched.
Beseeching me to come to her
, Graham had told them.
Not speaking, but letting that cold and damp touch my very bones so I’d feel what she felt. She didn’t say it out loud, maybe couldn’t, but she wanted me to stay down there with her. She didn’t want to be alone.

Jesse walked on, not stopping until he found a place where he could make his descent. A flashlight moved below him, its holder merged with the dark. The light bobbed as if on a river’s current, a river running uphill all the way to the iron gate that marked the end of forest service land. Then the light swung around, made its swaying way back down the logging road. Someone shouted and the disparate lights gathered like sparks returning to their source. Headlights and engines came to life, and two sets of red taillights dimmed and soon disappeared.

Jesse made his way down the slope, his body slantways, one hand close to the ground in case he slipped.
Low branches slapped his face. Once on level land he let minutes pass, listening for footsteps or a cough on the logging road, someone left behind to trick him into coming out. No moon shone but a few stars had settled overhead, enough light for him to make out a human form.

Jesse moved quietly up the logging road. Get back in the house and you’ll be all right, he told himself. He came to the iron gate and slipped under. It struck him only then that someone might be waiting at his house. He went to the left and stopped where a barbed-wire fence marked the pasture edge. The house lights were still off, like he’d left them. Jesse’s hand touched a strand of sagging barbed wire and he felt a vague reassurance in its being there, its familiarity. He was about to move closer when he heard a truck, soon saw its yellow beams crossing Sampson Ridge. As soon as the pickup pulled into the driveway, the porch light came on. Sheriff Arrowood appeared on the porch, one of Jesse’s shirts in his hand. Two men got out of the pickup and opened the tailgate. Bloodhounds leaped and tumbled from the truck bed, whining as the men gathered their leashes. He had to get back into the gorge, and quick, but his legs were suddenly stiff and unyielding as iron stobs. It’s just the fear, Jesse told himself. He clasped one of the fence’s rusty barbs and squeezed until pain reconnected his mind and body.

Jesse followed the land’s downward tilt, crossed back under the gate. The logging road leveled out and Jesse saw the outline of the homestead’s ruined chimney. As he came closer, the chimney solidified, grew darker than the dark around it, as if an unlit passageway into some greater darkness.

Jesse took the .32-20 from his pocket and let the pistol’s weight settle in his hand. If they caught him with it, that was just more trouble. Throw it so far they won’t find it, he told himself, because there’s prints on it. He turned toward the woods and heaved the pistol, almost falling with the effort. The gun went only a few feet before thunking solidly against a tree, landing close to the logging road if not on it. There was no time to find the pistol, because the hounds were at the gorge head now, flashlights dipping and rising behind them. He could tell by the hounds’ cries that they were already on his trail.

Jesse stepped into the creek, hoping that doing so might cause the dogs to lose his scent. If it worked, he could circle back and find the gun. What sparse light the stars had offered was snuffed out as the creek left the road and entered the woods. Jesse bumped against the banks, stumbled into deeper pockets of water that drenched his pants as well as his boots and socks. He fell and something tore in his shoulder.

But it worked. There was soon a confusion of barks
and howls, the flashlights no longer following him but instead sweeping the woods from one still point.

Jesse stepped out of the creek and sat down. He was shivering, his mind off plumb, every thought tilting toward panic. As he poured water from the boots, Jesse remembered his boot prints led directly from his house to the ginseng patch. They had ways of matching boots and their prints, and not just a certain foot size and make. He’d seen on a TV show how they could even match the worn part of the sole to a print. Jesse stuffed the socks inside the boots and threw them at the dark. Like the pistol they didn’t go far before hitting something solid.

It took him a long time to find the old logging road, and even when he was finally on it he was so disoriented that he wasn’t sure which direction to go. Jesse walked a while and came to a park campground, which meant he’d guessed wrong. He turned around and walked the other way. It felt like years had passed before he finally made it back to the homestead. A campfire now glowed and sparked between the homestead and the iron gate, the men hunting Jesse huddled around it. The pistol lay somewhere near the men, perhaps found already. Several of the hounds barked, impatient to get back onto the trail, but the searchers had evidently decided to wait till morning to continue. Though Jesse was too far away to hear them, he knew
they talked to help pass the time. They probably had food with them, perhaps coffee as well. Jesse realized he was thirsty and thought about going back to the creek for some water, but he was too tired.

Dew wet his bare feet as he passed the far edge of the homestead and then to the woods’ edge where the ginseng was. He sat down, and in a few minutes felt the night’s chill envelop him. A frost warning, the radio had said. He thought of how his great-aunt had taken off her clothes and how, despite the scientific explanation, it seemed to Jesse a final abdication of everything she had once been.

He looked toward the eastern sky. It seemed he’d been running a week’s worth of nights, but he saw the stars hadn’t begun to pale. The first pink smudges on the far ridgeline were a while away, perhaps hours. The night would linger long enough for what would or would not come. He waited.

S
he don’t understand what it’s like for me when she walks out the door on Monday and Wednesday nights. She don’t know how I sit in the dark watching the TV but all the while I’m listening for her car. Or understand I’m not ever certain till I hear the Chevy coming up the drive that she’s coming home. How each time a little less of her comes back, because after she checks on Janie she spreads the books open on the kitchen table, and she may as well still be at that college for her mind is so far inside what she’s studying. I rub the back of her neck. I say maybe we could go to bed a little early tonight. I
tell her there’s lots better things to do than study some old book. She knows my meaning.

“I’ve got to finish this chapter,” Lynn says, “maybe after that.”

But that “maybe” doesn’t happen. I go to bed alone. Pouring concrete is a young man’s job and I ain’t so young anymore. I need what sleep I can get to keep up.

“You’re getting long in the tooth, Bobby,” a young buck told me one afternoon I huffed and puffed to keep up. “You best get you one of them sit-down jobs, maybe test rocking chairs.”

They all got a good laugh out of that. Mr. Winchester, the boss man, laughed right along with them.

“Ole Bobby’s still got some life in him yet, ain’t you,” Mr. Winchester said.

He smiled when he said it, but there was some serious in his words.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I ain’t even got my second wind yet.”

Mr. Winchester laughed again, but I knew he’d had his eye on me. It won’t trouble him much to fire me when I can’t pull my weight anymore.

The nights Lynn stays up I don’t ever go right off to sleep, though I’m about nine ways whipped from work. I lay there in the dark and think about something she said a while back when she first took the notion to go back to school. You ought to be proud of me for wanting
to make something of myself, she’d said. Maybe it ain’t the way she means it to sound, but I can’t help thinking she was also saying, “Bobby, just because you’ve never made anything of yourself don’t mean I have to do the same.”

I think about something else she once told me. It was Christmas our senior year in high school. Lynn’s folks and brothers had finally gone to bed and me and her was on the couch. The lights was all off but for the tree lights glowing and flicking like little stars. I’d already unwrapped the box that had me a sweater in it. I took the ring out of my front pocket and gave it to her. I tried to act all casual but I could feel my hand trembling. We’d talked some about getting married but it had always been in the far-away, after I got a good job, after she’d got some more schooling. But I hadn’t wanted to wait that long. She’d put the ring on and though it was just a quarter-carat she made no notice of that.

“It’s so pretty,” Lynn had said.

“So will you?” I’d asked.

“Of course,” she’d told me. “It’s what I’ve wanted, more than anything in the world.”

So I lay in the bedroom nights remembering things and though I’m not more than ten feet away it’s like there’s a big glass door between me and the kitchen table, and it’s locked on Lynn’s side. We just as well might be living in different counties for all the closeness
I feel. A diamond can cut through glass, I’ve heard, but I ain’t so sure anymore.

One night I dream I’m falling. There are tree branches all around me but I can’t grab hold of one. I just keep falling and falling for forever. I wake up all sweaty and gasping for breath. My heart pounds like it’s some kind of animal trying to tear out my chest. Lynn’s got her back to me, sleeping like she ain’t got a care in the world. I look at the clock and see I have thirty minutes before the alarm goes off. I’ll sleep no more anyway so I pull on my work clothes and stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee.

The books are on the kitchen table, big thick books. I open up the least one, a book called
Astronomy Today
. I read some and it makes no sense. Even the words I know don’t seem to lead nowhere. They just as likely could be ants scurrying around the page. But Lynn understands them. She has to since she makes all As on her tests.

I touch the cigarette lighter in my pocket and think a book is so easy a thing to burn. I think how in five minutes they’d be nothing but ashes, ashes nobody could read. I get up before I dwell on such a thing too long. I check on Janie and she’s managed to kick the covers off the bed. It’s been a month since she started second grade but it seems more like a month since we brought her home from the hospital. Things can change faster
than a person can sometimes stand, Daddy used to say, and I’m learning the truth of that. Each morning it’s like Janie’s sprouted another inch.

“I’m a big girl now,” she tells her grandma and that always gets a good laugh. I took her the first day of school this year and it wasn’t like first grade when she was tearing up when me and Lynn left her there. Janie was excited this time, wanting to see her friends. I held her hand when we walked into the classroom. There was other parents milling around, the kids searching for the desk that had their name on it. I looked the room over pretty good. A hornet’s nest was stuck on a wall and a fish tank bubbled at the back, beside it a big blue globe like I’d had in my second-grade room.
WELCOME BACK
was written in big green letters on the door.

“You need to leave,” Janie said, letting go of my hand.

It wasn’t till then I noticed the rest of the parents already had, the kids but for Janie in their desks. That night in bed I’d told Lynn I thought we ought to have another kid.

“We barely can clothe and feed the one we got,” she’d said, then turned her back to me and went to sleep.

I
t’s not something I gnaw on a few weeks and then decide to do. I don’t give myself time to figure out it’s a bad idea. Instead, as soon as Lynn pulls out of the drive I round up Janie’s gown and toothbrush.

“You’re spending the night with Grandma,” I tell her.

“What about school?” Janie says.

“I’ll come by and get you come morning. I’ll bring you some school clothes.”

“Do I have to?” Janie says. “Grandma snores.”

“We ain’t arguing about this,” I tell her. “Get you some shoes on and let’s go.”

I say it kind of cross, which is a sorry way to act since it ain’t Janie that’s got me so out of sorts.

When we get to Momma’s I apologize for not calling first but she says there’s no bother.

“There ain’t no trouble between you and Lynn?” she asks.

“No ma’am,” I say.

I drive the five miles to the community college. I find Lynn’s car and park close by. I reckon the classes have all got started because there’s not any students in the parking lot. There ain’t a security guard around and it’s looking to be an easy thing to get done. I take my barlow knife out of the dash and stick it in my pocket. I keep to the shadows and come close to the nearest building. There’s big windows and five different classrooms.

It takes me a minute to find her, right up on the front row, writing down every word the teacher is saying. I’m next to a hedge so it keeps me mostly hid, which is a good thing for the moon and stars are out. The teacher
ain’t some old guy with glasses and a gray beard, like what I figured him to be. He’s got no beard, probably can’t even grow one.

He all of a sudden stops his talking and steps out the door and soon enough he’s coming out of the building and I’m thinking he must have seen me. I hunker in the bushes and get ready to make a run for the truck. I’m thinking if I have to knock him down to get there I’ve got no problem with that.

But he don’t come near the bushes where I am. He heads straight to a white Toyota parked between Lynn’s Chevy and my truck. He roots around the backseat a minute before taking out some books and papers.

He comes back, close enough I can smell whatever it is he splashed on his face that morning. I wonder why he needs to smell so good, who he thinks might like a man who smells like flowers. Back in the classroom he passes the books around. Lynn turns the books’ pages slow and careful, like they would break if she wasn’t prissy with them.

I figure I best go ahead and do what I come to do. I walk across the asphalt to the Chevy. I kneel beside the back left tire, the barlow knife in my fist. I slash it deep and don’t stop cutting till I hear a hiss. I stand up and look around.

Pretty sorry security, I’m thinking. I’ve done what I come for but I don’t close the knife. I kneel beside
the white Toyota. I start slashing the tire and for a second it’s like I’m slashing that smooth young face of his. Soon enough that tire looks like it’s been run through a combine.

I get in my truck and drive toward home. I’m shaking but don’t know what I’m afraid of. I turn on the TV when I get back but it’s just something to do while I wait for Lynn to call. Only she don’t. Thirty minutes after her class let out, I still ain’t heard a word. I get a picture in my mind of her out in that parking lot by herself but maybe not as by herself and safe as she thinks what with the security guard snoring away in some office. I’m thinking Lynn might be in trouble, trouble I’d put her in. I get my truck keys and am halfway out the door when headlights freeze me.

Lynn don’t wait for me to ask.

“I’m late because some asshole slashed my tire,” she says.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I say.

“The security guard said he’d put on the spare so I let him. That was easier than you driving five miles.”

Lynn steps past and drops her books on the kitchen table.

“Dr. Palmer had a tire slashed too.”

“Who changed his tire?” I ask.

Lynn looks at me.

“He did.”

“I wouldn’t have reckoned him to have the common sense to.”

“Well, he did,” Lynn says. “Just because somebody’s book-smart doesn’t mean that person can’t do anything else.”

“Where’s Janie?” Lynn asks when she sees the empty bed.

“She took a notion to spend the night with Momma,” I say.

“How’s she going to get to school come morning?” she asks.

“I’ll get her there,” I say.

Lynn sets down her books. They’re piled there in front of her like a big plate of food that’s making her stronger and stronger.

“I don’t reckon they got an idea of who done it?” I ask, trying to sound all casual.

Lynn gives a smile for the first time since she got out of the car.

“They’ll soon enough have a real good idea. The dumb son of a bitch didn’t even realize they have security cameras. They got it all on tape, even his license. The cops will have that guy in twenty-four hours. At least that’s what the security guard said.”

It takes me about two heartbeats to take that in. I feel like somebody just sucker-punched me. I open my mouth, but it takes a while to push some words out.

“I need to tell you something,” I say, whispery as an old sick man.

Lynn doesn’t look up. She’s already stuck herself deep in a book.

“I got three chapters to read, Bobby. Can’t it wait?”

I look at her. I know I’ve lost her, known it for a while. Me getting caught for slashing those tires won’t make it any worse, except maybe at the custody hearing.

“It can wait,” I say.

I go out to the deck and sit down. I smell the honeysuckle down by the creek. It’s a pretty kind of smell that any other time might ease my mind. A few bullfrogs grunt but the rest of the night is still as the bottom of a pond. So many stars are out that you can see how some seem strung together into shapes. Lynn knows what those shapes are, knows them by their names.

Make a wish if you see a falling star, Momma would always say, but though I haven’t seen one fall I think about what I’d wish, and what comes is a memory of me and Lynn and Janie. Janie was a baby then and we’d gone out to the river for a picnic. It was April and the river was too high and cold to swim but that didn’t matter. The sun was out and the dogwoods starting to whiten up their branches and you knew warm weather was coming.

After a while Janie got sleepy and Lynn put her in the stroller. She came back to the picnic table where I
was and sat down beside me. She laid her head against my shoulder.

“I hope things are always like this,” she said. “If there was a falling star that would be all I’d wish for.”

Then she’d kissed me, a kiss that promised more that night after we put Janie to bed.

But there wasn’t any falling star that afternoon and there ain’t one tonight. I suddenly wish Janie was here, because if she was I’d go inside and lay down beside her.

I’d stay there all night just listening to her breathe.

You best get used to it, a voice in my head says. There’s coming lots of nights you’ll not have her in the same place as you, maybe not even in the same town. I look up at the sky a last time but nothing falls. I close my eyes and smell the honeysuckle, make believe Janie’s asleep a few feet away, that Lynn will put away her books in a minute and we’ll go to bed. I’m making up a memory I’ll soon enough need.